Daily Archives: July 26, 2009

Heading into Sunday’s finale against the A’s, Yankee manager Joe Girardi figured he had a well-rested bullpen (Phil Hughes last pitched on Thursday night, Mariano Rivera hadn’t pitched since Wednesday) and his fifth starter on the mound making just his second major league start since 2007, so he devised a plan that required his starter to go no more than six innings.

As it turned out, Sergio Mitre only needed 72 pitches to get through the first five frames. Still, nursing a one-run lead heading into the sixth, Girardi had lefty Phil Coke warm and waiting. Kurt Suzuki led off with a single off Mitre, and with four of five hitters behind Suzuki being left-handed, Girardi put his plan into effect right there and then.

Since Girardi didn’t appraise me of his plan before the game, I had no idea what the hell he was doing. Mitre had given up three runs on nine hits, but he hadn’t walked anybody and was getting a ton of ground balls. After a rough first in which he allowed two runs on a double and three singles, two of the latter well-placed bouncers up the middle, Mitre had pitched effectively and economically. After pitching around a two-out single for a scoreless second, Mitre worked a four-pitch third, hitting Scott Hairston with a curveball with his first pitch, then getting a 1-6-3 double play from Jack Cust on his next offering and getting Suzuki to groundout on an 0-1 pitch. A pair of singles set up a Mark Ells sac fly in the fourth, but Mitre survived his own throwing error on a would-be double play by getting a successful 6-4-3 DP on the next pitch thanks to some great glovework by Derek Jeter and Robinson Cano (Jeter ranged into the hole, turned and fired a strike to Cano without making a leap; Cano caught the ball with his back to first then spun and made one of his signature all-wrist throws, hard and on the money to Mark Teixeira to beat Adam Kennedy at first). In the fifth, Mitre again induced a 6-4-3, then struck out Cust on four pitches.

Mitre had thrown 91 pitches in his last start, so there was no good reason to take Mitre out. It smacked of overmanaging, particularly after Coke gave up a two-out, two-run homer to righty-swinging Mark Ellis that gave the A’s a 5-4 lead.

Fortunately, the Yankee offense was having none of that. After Mitre gave up two runs in the top of the first, the Yankees answered back with four in the bottom of the first, the key hit being a three-run bases-loaded double by Robinson Cano (who went to third on the throw home, but overslid the bag and was tagged out for the third out). After Ellis’s two-run jack gave the A’s their second lead of the game, the Yankees stormed right back with three in the bottom of the sixth when Melky Cabrera drew a one-out walk, Cody Ransom doubled him to third, Derek Jeter singled them both home, then Damon doubled and scored on a Mark Teixeira single. (Jeter didn’t score in that sequence because he was picked off first by A’s starter Dallas Braden, who has a sick move. Jeter was roughly two steps off the bag when Braden quickly stepped off the rubber and fired the ball right at Jeter’s bellybutton. The ball got there almost before Jeter could react and all first baseman Daric Barton had to do was put his glove on Jeter’s stomach and catch the ball.)

With Phil Coke thus having successfully vultured the win, Girardi went to Phil Hughes, who worked a 1-2-3 seventh striking out Hairston and Cust and then Suzuki to start the eighth. Hughes then lost a eight-pitch battle with Ryan Sweeney, walking him, and gave up a double to Daric Barton to put runners on the corners and put his scoreless streak in jeopardy. Girardi promptly brought in Brian Bruney, who struck out Mark Ellis on four pitches, then brought in Mariano Rivera for the four-pitch save. A pair of groundouts and a pair of strikeouts later, the Yankees had taken the series with a 7-5 win, wrapping up their second-half-opening home stand with a 9-1 record.

I love it when a plan comes together.

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The Yanks are hoping to avoid a split with the lowly A’s today as they send Sergio Mitre back to the mound. Mitre lasted 5 2/3 innings in his first Yankee start, allowing four runs (one of them unearned) on eight hits and a walk while striking out four. The lone walk was encouraging, as was the fact that Mitre got nine groundouts against just four fly outs. Still, with Chien-Ming Wang’s prognosis looking bleak, Mitre will have to do still better tonight to continue to quell the calls for Phil Hughes to be converted back to starting. Alex Rodriguez gets the day off today. Cody Ransom’s at third. Jorge Posada is hitting cleanup. Despite Brett Gardner’s big RBI triple yesterday, Melky Cabrera’s back in center.

It’s fitting that the Yankees and A’s are playing today as Rickey Henderson, who spent four and a half of his prime years as a New York Yankee, enters the Hall of Fame wearing an A’s cap. Having come of age as a fan during Rickey’s Yankee heyday, Rickey holds a special place in my baseball heart, and seeing the green and gold flash against those midnight blue pinstripes will keep those memories flooding back.

The Yankees and A’s have a long history of sharing great players, dating back to Hall of Famer Frank “Home Run” Baker, who hit exactly half of his career homers with each team. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Kansas City Athletics often appeared to be little more than a farm team for the great Yankee teams of that era, with Roger Maris being the cream of the Kansas City crop to flower in the Bronx. Then, of course, there was Catfish and Reggie, two of the three Hall of Famers from the early ’70s Oakland dynasty, who were also key players on the back-to-back Yankee Championship teams in the latter half of the decade.

When Rickey set the all-time single season stolen base record in 1982, it was at the urging and ever-present green light of A’s manager Billy Martin, who himself had been banished to the old KC A’s following the infamous Copacabana incident in 1957 and would be back managing the Yankees in 1983. Billy managed Rickey on the Yankees to one of Rickey’s greatest seasons in 1985. More recently, Jason Giambi, who won an AL MVP with Oakland, placed his name among the Yankee franchise leaders in home runs (tenth), slugging* (seventh), and on-base percentage* (fifth).

With Giambi on the DL after having returned to the A’s this year, the top cross-team names in today’s game are Yankee right fielder Nick Swisher, who was part of Billy Beane’s famous Moneyball draft, Oakland manger Bob Geren, a former Yankee catcher from the dark days of the early ’90s, and A’s reliever Russ Springer, who made his major league debut as a Yankee the year after Geren was waived and is old enough to have been traded with J.T. Snow for Jim Abbott.

And since that stream of consciousness took us a considerable distance from the Hall of Fame, here’s a top-10 list of Hall of Fame classes that I assembled for SI.com. Yankees and A’s abound there as well.

*minimum 1,000 plate appearances